Enterprises face numerous challenges in delivering applications and critical business data across their networks. As an enterprise's workforce becomes more globally and widely distributed, providing adequate network service levels has become increasingly difficult. With continuous pressure from industry and federal regulation, an information technology (IT) department of an enterprise can face a significant challenge in managing costly infrastructure. In certain cases, there is pressure to consolidate this costly infrastructure into a data center, or (separately) to provision scalable, virtualized branch-office application delivery platforms to improve data protection, security, and availability (without sacrificing a service level that the distributed workforce has come to expect).
As applications gain complexity, delivering applications to an enterprise edge becomes increasingly challenging and expensive. Furthermore, in today's environment, IT managers face constant pressure to reduce application delivery costs over the entire network, while maintaining (and even enhancing) application availability, performance, and agility. However, these goals may be difficult to achieve because of poor application response time experienced by users in remote sites. Optimizing data transfers across networks presents a challenge to network operators, component manufactures, and service providers alike.